social-justice-activists

"Amina Doherty, Changing Lives,https://wadadlipen.wordpress.com/2012/04/10/amina-doherty-changing-lives/"

"I truly believe that art (and I use this term loosely here to refer to all forms of creative expression) provides an incredible opportunity for people to bring their full selves to their activism. We are not one-dimensional beings and thus we are affected and influenced by all of the things around us. I see art as an opportunity to take some of the very complex concepts and issues that we face on a daily basis and break them down in ways that are more palatable and easily digestible by young people."

"We must move in these spaces to encourage increased support to young women and girls not simply because it is ‘smart economics’ but because gender equality is a right"

"A feminist foreign policy must be radical, innovative and intersectional. It moves beyond the notion of “add women and stir” and seeks to be transformative. It challenges power by paying attention to and challenging the systems and institutions, such as governments and corporations, that benefit from the oppression of women. A feminist foreign policy is one that moves beyond limiting language, and centers women and all marginalized voices, including trans and intersex folks"

"Solidarity as a strategy of resistance reminds us that we are the sum of many parts and, as bell hooks reminds us, “Solidarity is different than support.” Solidarity is about showing up and sticking with things for the long-run. It is about being committed and making bonds with each other in real and deeply personal ways. It is about standing at the intersections and bringing everyone along."

"We decided that in order to shift the power and to put resources in the hands of young feminists, we would need to turn the traditional funding model on its head. This meant that we would need to make space for feminist perspectives, methodologies, ideas and demands—as well as for our physical selves—in the philanthropic world."

"When I find it hard to write or create, it’s often a sign to take a break and be with family and friends, but to also move in your body by doing some exercises."

"This is an atrocity that happens and my hope is the piece pulls people in to be witnesses of what they are denying."

"It took some time but it’s because it required a huge set."

"If anybody is out there and wants to make their own content with big ideas, keep that dream but also scale it down to make it possible with what you have."

"I have a lot of content in music and poetry that is waiting for me to make visual content for it."

"Poetry can be really heavy and being able to carry those emotions and hold them is something I get from my acting skills."

"My messages are mainly about bringing into discussions topics that our societies shy away from but are at the core of issues that we deal with."

"At times it’s challenging because I have to teach myself new skills."

"However, as Rwandans, we need to realise that there is more that we can do to contribute to the life of an artiste."

"Create a work ethic that makes you stand out from people who just consider art as a hobby."

"I am not going to say it’s easy but it’s definitely worth it when you love it and when you know what you are capable of and willing to go through thick and thin to make sure that what you envision for yourself becomes true."

"Stay true to yourself and work hard to become the person you dream to be."

"Sometimes, you need to completely take a break from creating and watch other people do their arts and allow yourself the time to get inspired from that."

"I had felt for a long time that the two struggles for disarmament and for Negro rights-were properly parts of the one struggle. The same nonviolent tactic joined us, but more than this: our struggles were fundamentally one-to commit our country in act as well as in word to the extraordinary faith announced in our Declaration of Independence: that all men are endowed with certain rights that must not be denied them."

"Learning from Barbara Deming: First: She's a listener. So you can learn something about paying attention. Second: She's stubborn. So you can learn how to stand, look into the other's face, and not run. Third: She's just. So you can learn something about patience. Fourth: She loves us-women, I mean-and speaks to the world. So you can learn how to love women and men."

"Of course she never separated herself from the struggles against racism and militarism. She integrated them into her thinking. As she lived her life, she made new connections which required new analyses. And with each new understanding, she acted, "clinging to the truth," as she had learned from Gandhi, offering opposition as education and love as a way to patience. The long letters that Barbara began to write after her terrible automobile accident in '71 have become books. They are studious, relentless in argument; she seems sometimes in these letters to be lifting one straw at a time from a haystack of misunderstanding to get to a needle of perfect communication stuck somewhere at the bottom. At the same time she had developed a style which enabled her to appear to be listening to her correspondent while writing the letter."

"As a writer myself, I must believe that Barbara's attention to the "other" (who used to be called the stranger) was an organic part of her life as an artist-the writer's natural business is a long stretch toward the unknown life. All Barbara's "others" (the world's "others," too), the neighbor, the cop, the black woman or man, the Vietnamese, led her inexorably to the shadowed lives of women, and finally to the unknown humiliated lesbian, herself. It was hard when this knowledge forced her to separate her life and work from other comrades, most of whom believed themselves eternally connected to her. "Why leave us now?" friends cried out in the pages of WIN magazine. "Now, just when we have great tasks. She explained: "Because I realize that just as the black life is invisible to white America, so I see now my life is invisible to you." Of course she was not the separator. They had been, the friends who wrote, saying, "We know it's okay to be a woman," but hated to hear the word "feminist" said again and again. She stubbornly insisted that they recognize Woman, and especially Lesbian, as an oppressed class from which much of the radical world had separated itself-some for ideological reasons, some with a kind of absentminded "We'll get to that later." (And many did.)"

"The direction her life took was probably established by the fact that her first important love was another woman, a hard reality that is not discussed in Prison Notes (this is probably the reason she insisted that her letter to Norma Becker be included in any reissue of that book). This truth about herself took personal political years in which she wrote stories and poems and she became a fine artist who suffered because she was unable to fully use the one unchangeable fact of her life-that she was a woman who loved women."

"Prison Notes is the story of two walks undertaken to help change the world without killing it. Barbara Deming was an important member of both. Twenty years of her brave life lie between them. On that first long journey, men and women walked and went to jail together. Women alone took the second shorter walk, and fifty-four were jailed. Barbara was among them. It was her last action, and those who were arrested with her are blessed to have lived beside her strong, informed, and loving spirit for those few days. That difference between the two walks measures a development in movement history and also tells the distance Barbara traveled in those twenty years."

"At the Friends' Meeting House a couple of weeks after Barbara Deming died, we gathered to remember her for one another, to take some comfort and establish her continuity in our bones..."This too," our friend Blue said, and gave me an envelope. In it were shards and stones gathered from the rubble of Vietnamese towns in '67 or '68. On the envelope, these shaky letters were written: "endless love." Nothing personal there, not "with endless love." The words were written waveringly, with a dying hand, on paper that covered bits and pieces of our common remembrance and understanding of another people's great suffering. I thought Barbara was saying, Send those words out, out out into the airy rubbly meaty mortal fact of the world, endless love, the dangerous transforming spirit."

"I believe in the stubbornness of civil disobedience and I'm not afraid of it. I remember one May Day demonstration. In 1971. Still wartime. We were arrested and we were in this big, sort of football field. Barbara Deming and I were walking around, arm in arm. We had been arrested together. It was very cold. Everybody was finding someone to walk very close to. Later on, one person wasn't enough, we would try to get into groups that huddled: fifteen. But at that point, Barbara and I were walking arm in arm and it was a pretty messy place, because that was the year they arrested thirteen or fourteen thousand people, just picking them up off the street, and then they didn't know what the hell to do with them. At that point we were in a football field. Later, we were put inside a stadium. And so we were walking around, arm in arm, talking to each other, and then congresspeople came in to see what was going on, and Bella Abzug came over to talk to us. She and I had always had these disagreements about the electoral work and what you can call action, direct action, and we would talk to each other about this. So she came over and she looked at me and Barbara walking arm in arm. She asked how we were. She was a congresswoman at this time. She was worried about us. We said we were all right. And then she said, "Well, I guess you're where you want to be and I'm where I want to be." And we laughed, we all laughed together. And I want to say about Bella that she was at this Women's Pentagon demonstration. She came, she walked with everybody, she didn't look for any limelight of any kind. She just sort of walked, and begged me not to get arrested. Again, she said she thought it was a waste of time. I could do more outside. But she really was just a part of the action. That's what we wanted all of our leaders to be, just a part of the women's action."

"This has recently been stressed by Barbara Deming in her plea for nonviolent action-"On Revolution and Equilibrium," in Revolution: Violent and Nonviolent, reprinted from Liberation, February, 1968. She says about Fanon, on p. 3: "It is my conviction that he can be quoted as well to plead for nonviolence.... Every time you find the word 'violence' in his pages, substitute for it the phrase 'radical and uncompromising action.' I contend that with the exception of a very few passages this substitution can be made, and that the action he calls for could just as well be nonviolent action." Even more important for my purposes: Miss Deming also tries to distinguish clearly between power and violence, and she recognizes that "nonviolent disruption" means "to exert force.... It resorts even to what can only be called physical force" (p. 6). However, she curiously underestimates the effect of this force of disruption, which stops short only of physical injury, when she says, "the human rights of the adversary are respected" (p. 7). Only the opponent's right to life, but none of the other human rights, is actually respected. The same is of course true for those who advocate "violence against things" as opposed to "violence against persons.""

"the memoirs of poet Elsa Gidlow and civil rights and peace activist Barbara Deming evidenced the struggle with which so many have engaged for a lesbian identity rooted in self-esteem and dignity. In publicly affirming who they were, each encouraged the sense of continuity and tradition central to the formation of lesbian archives. Deming, writing in 1971 to her "dear brother and dear sister," Ray Robinson and Cheryl Buswell-Robinson, southern civil rights activists with whom she had worked in the 1960s, confronted her own oppression as a lesbian and the anger and agony of her feelings of powerlessness: "The bottom I write about of course is the bottom of being a homosexual. Facing always the threat of being despised for that. . . . And as I write this, the tears begin to gush from my eyes, and I know I'm writing the truth of it.""

"the issue of war and peace remains fundamentally the issue of whether or not one is going to be willing to respect one’s fellow man."

"In 1967, she spoke of “the need to become more bold, and therefore more effective” and that would bring more government repression. “And then if we do not all stand together, helping always whomever is singled out for punishment, our effectiveness will end… We must certainly be frank with each other when we disagree,” she told War Resisters League. “We will need every one of us. We are all part of one another.”"

"Yesterday, I watched the President, in his inauguration speech, mention “freedom” twenty-plus times. The day before, I heard his stone-faced, reactionary nominee for Secretary of State, Ms. Condoleezza, speak so insensitively about the issue of torture. George Bush doesn’t know anything about freedom, because he’s not hearing the cries of the Haitian people. He’s not hearing the cries of the Palestinian people who live under the boot of Israel’s brutal and barbaric and racist occupation of the Palestinian people. He does not hear the cries of the Iraqi people. He does not hear the cries of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib. He does not hear the cries of the people in the Congo where the United States policy of so many years created the division in that country that we’re seeing right now. I didn’t hear him talk about the people in the far region of the Sudan. I didn’t hear him talk about the people in the ghettos and barrios of America. I didn’t hear him talk about the working people of our country who don’t have a living wage and don’t have health care. I didn’t hear him talk about our youth who are dying in our streets and our children who are going hungry every day. I didn’t hear him talk about any of these things. He knows nothing about freedom. We know everything about freedom. We’re the moral authority of our nation. Our responsibility is to be the other voice and the other authority because there’s a dual authority in the country. There’s one authority representing the reactionary and evil and criminal policies of this administration, and then there’s the authority of people who love and yearn for justice and peace and human rights."

"The visits to Cairo (Illinois) totally transformed my life. I made my decision on the bus leaving there that I would commit my life to the movement of social justice and Black rights. I knew I would use whatever I learned at college for the struggle of black equality and black liberation."

"You can tell people to go get screened, but colonoscopies cost money, from $700 to $900 every time you go. People who are uninsured, and that’s 44 million people in this country, 40 million partially insured, 164 million people in this country who are in health jeopardy because they don’t have access to some form of health insurance. We’re talking about a situation where people don’t have the possibility of getting screened. So we can’t just talk about getting screened, we have to talk about how we can organize and protest and raise the fundamental public policy issues including the need for national comprehensive universal health care, and that’s what the Spirit of Hope Campaign which has been mobilized around my situation is doing, to raise these issues of universal access and racial disparities in the health care system."

"We’re talking about the need for health justice for all, and that is also linked to the issue of our nation’s priorities, Amy. We can’t talk about health justice unless we talk about the war in Iraq? Why? Because we’re talking about $400 billion being spent on war and occupation, when people in this country don’t have fundamental access to health care. Billions of dollars are being spent on research and development for space weapons, for nuclear weapons technology. Dr. King said that when a nation focuses on these kinds of things, our priorities are out of whack."

"It’s a disgrace that we live in a country where people have to face these kinds of obstacles to quality care."

"In the region called “Cancer Alley” between Baton Rouge and New Orleans along the Mississippi river, there’s scores of impoverished, mostly African American and poor communities living in close proximity to oil refineries, plastic production facilities and literally seven days a week, nearly 24 hours a day, those communities are being rained on with some of the worst toxins and chemicals imaginable. So people are very, very sick. Children in those communities miss school because they have high rates of asthma and other severe respiratory problems, and there are very high rates of cancer in that region of the country and in other parts of the country where people of color and poor and working class people are disproportionately exposed to sources of pollution."

"There’s a lot of dogmatism in movements, a lot of finger-wagging, a lot of angry voices, but with Damu, he met you where you were"

"In my estimation, he’s one of the greatest organizers that this country has ever had."

"Why are we acting surprised? Why are we locking away Africa when this virus is already on three continents? Nobody is locking away Belgium and Israel. Why are we locking away Africa? It is wrong and it is time our African leaders stand up and find their voice."

"Had the first Covid-19 virus, the one first identified in China last year, originated in Africa it is clear the world would have locked us away and thrown away the key, there would have been no urgency to develop vaccines because we would have been expendable. Africa would have become known as the continent of Covid-19. What is going on is inevitable and is a result of the world’s failure to vaccinate in an equitable, urgent, and speedy manner."

"We knew this was a crossroads it was going to bring us to. It was going to bring us to a variant. It was going to bring us to more dangerous variants."

"Any achievement that I accomplished, many people attributed to the fact that I was his daughter"

"I have always considered myself to possess a sixth sense, and my mother always told me to tap into my gut, my intuition"

"I was taught by both of my parents to work hard, to be passionate about whatever I did, and I felt that I did that and kind of got to where I am today because of hard work and passion and determination"

"Liberalism would progress just as far as the great money bags of capitalism would allow it to progress, and so I took the plunge and joined the SDF ... because I felt that they stood in England for revolt against present conditions, and for a reorganised society which would be built up by the efforts of the workers themselves."

"The time has arrived for the working classes to seize political power and use it to overthrow the competitive system and establish in its place state cooperation."

""The old White Rabbit", as Hugh Dalton called him, hampered rearmament till 1935. He was one of those first-class Christians who have so nearly wrecked Christian civilization."

"The most lovable figure in modern politics."

"[David Lloyd George] said he had talked to George Lansbury in the House about Lansbury's recent visit to Hitler, and Lansbury had entirely agreed that Hitler wanted peace and to be friends with this country. ‘Lansbury talked to me very frankly. He said he was in despair in regard to his own party.’"